Compelling culture: The rhetoric of assimilation among Samoan migrants in the United States

Studies of assimilation tend to focus on whether or not members of a migrant
group are adjusting to their new surroundings. This article inverts this focus, asking not
how migrant groups adjust, but rather how migrant groups use the language of
assimilation to explain generation gaps and other exigencies of migration. This inversion
sheds light on the ways a migrant group’s epistemological assumptions underlie their
understandings of cultural identity, and shape how they might respond to dilemmas
caused by migration. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork among Samoan migrants in
the United States, the article explores how and why community workers use the rhetoric
of assimilation to teach Samoan parents how to raise children in the U.S. context.